Germany Uses YouTube to Rally Bailout Support

Germany’s parliament is expected to give broad backing on Thursday to a European aid package for ailing Spanish banks, but the government left nothing to chance this week, appealing to citizens and lawmakers in Internet video messages and local media to support the bailout.

German lawmakers began returning to the rainy capital on Wednesday, called back from summer vacations for a special session of parliament to decide whether to approve up to €100 billion ($123 billion) in loans from the euro zone’s bailout fund to the Spanish government to refinance the country’s ailing savings banks. The Spanish rescue package is expected to pass with a broad multiparty majority, but with each new euro-zone bailout, public doubts about the euro rise.

In the face of criticism of the bailouts, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, took the campaign to YouTube, posting short, in-house interviews in which they sought to reassure ordinary Germans that helping Spain is in Germany’s own interests and would help to stabilize the euro zone. In a lighthearted interview conducted for her Christian Democratic Union party, a relaxed Ms. Merkel gave rare insight into her vacation plans, saying that after Thursday’s vote she would attend the Bayreuth Music Festival next week and then take a vacation. She acknowledged that the euro project—the common currency shared by 17 European countries—was disappointing, but reassured voters that she was confident the euro can be saved.

“Naturally, the project hasn’t been shaped in a way that we can be certain that everything will be well in the end. That means we have to keep working on it. But I am nevertheless optimistic that we will succeed,” Ms. Merkel said.

Ms. Merkel hasn’t suffered as a result of the euro crisis. Her popularity with voters is stable at nearly 70% and she is the longest-serving government leader in Europe. But with each new bailout German voters become more worried that they will ultimately be made to foot the bill for the debts of other euro-zone members. As a result, although a large majority of Germans support Ms. Merkel’s handling of the crisis, an equally large majority rejects her ideas for a European fiscal union that would open Germany’s deep pockets in exchange for control over euro-zone budgets.

With public opinion possibly at a tipping point, the ranks of the bailout critics in parliament are growing. Frank Schäffler, a lawmaker from the pro-business Free Democrats, junior partner in Ms. Merkel’s center-right coalition, said he would vote against the Spanish rescue, and that he doubted the bailout would be big enough to plug the hole in Spain’s banking system.

“We are not financing a single systemically relevant bank, but rather Spain’s savings banks,” he said.